Review: Dell’s disappointing Streak 7

Last year, as manufacturers scrambled to throw anything against the wall in an attempt to compete with Apple’s iPad, Dell tossed out an odd one: a 5-inch device called the Streak that was actually an oversized smartphone.

The Streak’s awkward size was too big for a phone and too small for a tablet. In addition, it was saddled with an outdated version of Android – 1.6, when most other cutting edge Android devices had 2.1. Generally, it was a swing and a miss for the Round Rock-based PC maker.

Now, Dell’s back at the plate with a new tablet,the Streak 7. As its name implies, it’s a 7-inch model, and there’s no ambiguity about what it is. The Streak 7 is a full-out tablet, and it’s available through T-Mobile at a pretty good price: $200 with a 2-year contract, or $450 without.

However, to fully torture the baseball metaphor, the Streak 7 is, at best, a foul ball into the stands, and that’s a shame. It has a lot of potential, but some of the choices Dell made to keep the price down are not good ones.

On paper, the Streak 7 should make you drool. It’s got a 1-GHz, dual-core, nVidia Tegra 2 processor, making this one of the first tablets with that vaunted chip. It talks to T-Mobile’s faster, HSPA+ cellular data network. It has 16 GB of internal memory, and an SD slot lets you add more. The Streak 7 has front and rear cameras, at 1.3 and 5 megapixels, respectively.

And it’s running the relatively up-to-date Android 2.2, a.k.a. Froyo. Yeah, it could have 2.3, or Gingerbread, but Dell’s got an even better dessert cooking in the kitchen. The company is promising a quick upgrade to Honeycomb, the version of Android that Google is designing specifically for tablets.

So what’s not to love about the Streak? Sadly, plenty.

Let’s start with the display. The 7-inch display is one of the dimmest I’ve seen on a tablet. Even with the automatic brightness control turned off and brightness cranked up all the way, you’re left wanting more. And if that’s not bad enough, it also has a very narrow viewing angle. Tilt the screen just a bit to the left or right, and it blacks out quickly.

The screen has a resolution of 800-by-600 pixels, which makes for a grainy look. Text is noticeably blocky, for example, and images that should be crisp seem fuzzy and dull. By comparison,Samsung’s Galaxy Tab has a 1,024-by-600 resolution and a brighter, crisper display. Of course, it’s also more expensive, but this is a clear case of "you get what you pay for".

Looking at the specs, you’d also think the Dell Streak 7 would live up to the speed implied in its name. However, I found it to be balky at times, particularly when moving between home screens, where Dell has installed a series of oversized widgets it calls Stage. The widgets provide quick access to Facebook and Twitter accounts, e-mail, music and other common features, but they take up a full home screen when they’re installed. Fortunately, you can remove them. When I did, switching between home screens sped up, but not by much.

The Streak 7’s physical design is pleasant enough. It weighs just under a pound, with its horizontal edges tapering slightly. It feels sturdy, and a diamond-etched pattern on the back keeps the Streak from slipping out of your hands.

Dell has done something odd with the software buttons on the Streak. Normally, an Android device has four buttons below the screen – Home, Menu, Back and Search. For some reason, there’s no search button. That means you either must launch a browser, dive in to the applications or rely on a home-screen widget to initiate a search. Why Dell would remove something so useful is a mystery.

Where the Streak shines is in its connected features. Video and Flash content play flawlessly. Streaming video over T-Mobile’s HSPA+ network is a joy. At my home, I averaged between 3-5 Mbps for downloads and almost 3 Mbps up. I found it fast enough that I didn’t feel compelled to connect it to my home Wi-Fi network. Except for the fact that the screen isn’t bright enough and has a low resolution, the Streak 7 makes for a great media device.

However, that speed comes at a price. When connected to the HSPA+ network, the Streak 7’s battery life is awful. With moderate use, it lasted about a day before it the battery died. That’s less staying power than my iPhone 4! By contrast, the Galaxy Tab went several days before I had to recharge it, and my iPad lasts at least a week between charges.

As is the case with Android tablets, you must put up with a fair number of crapware apps (crapps?) that you can’t easily delete, including Brain Pop, a kids’ game; Slacker, a music service; Let’s Golf, a golf game; as well as several T-Mobile apps. (Memo to Google: Please design, build and sell the Nexus Tab, a "pure Android" tablet that’s crapware-free. Thanks!)

About the only thing to recommend the Streak 7 is its price. If you’re looking for a relatively powerful tablet with an impressively low price tag, this device may be attractive. It may even gain some luster once it gets its promised Honeycomb update. But other than that, there’s not much to recommend it, and that’s a shame. The Streak 7 had the potential to be real contender.